I'm interested in a couple of these as well. Are the PCB's currently for sale? I would be interested in 2 with the GAL and EPROM.

What kind of transfer speeds can you get out of this? I would assume it'd be similar to an SDrive running at 127k as far as transfer rates go wouldn't it? I have piles of 3.5" floppies and a stack of old PC floppy drives.... would love to put them to use. You could squeeze a lot of 8-bit stuff on a 3.5" floppy.

With 512 byte sector support, could the Maxi drive read from one? That would be kinda neat, no need for an SDrive then, one drive with the smartmedia adapter stuffed in it and one with a normal floppy. I had an old camera that used SmartMedia, still have a couple cards and the floppy adapter.

LOL i read this topic,ZAXON is a scary nicname... . I only made new design of Karin PCB and i give it to Stryker. Stryker add few changes to PCB, push people to writing software, made prototype ,and all dirty jobs arround.Full respect.

Anyway , some history, about Zaxon on PCB,

2 other my version of Karin maxi:

First internal kynar version mounting in socket on 6502, made in 2009 :

SMD version,(only wd1772,rom and gal is in DIP, rest of parts is on bottom side, project is free (gerber for pcb,schematic,part list,all data aviable, just contact me if you have made)

I'm interested in a couple of these as well. Are the PCB's currently for sale? I would be interested in 2 with the GAL and EPROM.

What kind of transfer speeds can you get out of this? I would assume it'd be similar to an SDrive running at 127k as far as transfer rates go wouldn't it? I have piles of 3.5" floppies and a stack of old PC floppy drives.... would love to put them to use. You could squeeze a lot of 8-bit stuff on a 3.5" floppy.

With 512 byte sector support, could the Maxi drive read from one? That would be kinda neat, no need for an SDrive then, one drive with the smartmedia adapter stuffed in it and one with a normal floppy. I had an old camera that used SmartMedia, still have a couple cards and the floppy adapter.

I can't say for sure, but since this is a parallel device and doesn't use SIO at all, the transfer speed should be WAY above an SDrive running at 127k. As an example, the IDE+ under Sparta DOS X 4.45 with screen DMA off can almost break 100kB/sec!

I thought that RWTEST results on a (parallel) Black Box Floppy Board should be indicative, but I'm skeptical of the results.

Double Density Disk, MyDos) (?)
Write 44122
Read 43152
Ave. 43637

Note: This is just about equivalent to a MyDos ramdisk. These are more than 50% higher than MyDos with an IDE+2 hard drive and 256-byte sectors. I've read that PBI code is actually fairly slow, but these figures just don't look right...

Double Density, SDX (?)
Write 85367
Read 98172
Ave. 91770

These results also don't look reasonable to me, since this is with 256-byte sectors, and almost double what I get with a IDE+2 hard drive with SDX and 512-byte sectors. Also way more than double the results with SDX and 256-byte sectors on the IDE+2. Perhaps someone can shed some light on this?

Here are IDE+2 RWTEST results for comparison:

MyDos DD-256
Write 21000
Read 28455
Ave. 24727

SDX DD-256
Write 27082
Read 46749
Ave. 36916

SDX DD-512
Read 45661
Write 62332
Ave. 53997

SDX (4.42) evidently cannot format a floppy with 512-byte sectors. All I get is "Error Formatting." I unsuccessfully tried several methods to get 512-byte sectors including formatting the floppy on the PC and then writing a directory with SDX.

Some look a bit unrealistic. With floppy you have the big limitations of RPM and step time.

ie at 300 RPM, at best you're reading an entire track in 1/5th of a second and then you have the stepping/settling delay/rotational latency when waiting for the next track to come in.
Same deal of course with a HDD but track sizes are usually a lot bigger and step/settling times a lot less.

A floppy with 11 x 512 sectors is only 5.5K per track. Possibly you could get skewed results if the interface buffers tracks and returns the data in one big burst.

You can try for "best case" times by using a batch file under SDX, e.g. something like:

POKE 559,0
RWTEST <parms>
POKE 559,34

Depending on how the interface works you might gain 30% or more speedup.

I'm interested in a couple of these as well. Are the PCB's currently for sale? I would be interested in 2 with the GAL and EPROM.

What kind of transfer speeds can you get out of this? I would assume it'd be similar to an SDrive running at 127k as far as transfer rates go wouldn't it? I have piles of 3.5" floppies and a stack of old PC floppy drives.... would love to put them to use. You could squeeze a lot of 8-bit stuff on a 3.5" floppy.

With 512 byte sector support, could the Maxi drive read from one? That would be kinda neat, no need for an SDrive then, one drive with the smartmedia adapter stuffed in it and one with a normal floppy. I had an old camera that used SmartMedia, still have a couple cards and the floppy adapter.

I can't say for sure, but since this is a parallel device and doesn't use SIO at all, the transfer speed should be WAY above an SDrive running at 127k. As an example, the IDE+ under Sparta DOS X 4.45 with screen DMA off can almost break 100kB/sec!

Yes, PBI is MUCH faster than SIO. Floppy drives are not nearly as fast as PBI itself however. Typically floppy drives are somewhere between 125kbit - 500kbit. Usually actual throughput is on the lower end of that scale.